


Sore Eyes

by eruthiel



Category: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Genre: 1970s, First Meetings, Gen, Homesickness, Pre-Canon, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-11
Updated: 2013-11-11
Packaged: 2017-12-31 06:22:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1028288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eruthiel/pseuds/eruthiel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ford doesn't expect anything to come of this interview, and in a way he's right. In another, more important way, he's the opposite of that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sore Eyes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Skew](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skew/gifts).



> [So here's a thing.](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4B6E0mijV5A) Arthur and Ford have known each other for "five years, maybe six." Arthur moved from London to the West Country "about three years" ago. Ford lives close enough to casually drop round of a morning. So seriously, what happened there? Actually this isn't a story about that, but if anybody knows, please fill me in. Hope you enjoy, Skew!~ I liked your letter and couldn't resist writing you a thing. <3

Once, when Ford Prefect was stopping over on Epsilon Eridani b, a minor falling-out over a girl escalated into a rather dramatic vendetta waged against him by an entire family of Eridian fear wasps. Since Eridian fear wasps are exactly as unpleasant as the English translation of their name suggests, and since they breed in colonies of up to twelve million, this was no picnic for Ford at the time. Of course he fled the planet on the first ship he could find, but the experience was still very traumatic for him - not least because the cost of extracting all those stings from his subcutis left him in considerable debt.

Field researchers for _The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy_ are not well paid, or rather they are, but in prestige and adventure and sex appeal rather than in actual pay. This had never bothered Ford before, because in his view the whole point of having money was to spend it on all those other fun things; on a normal day, cutting out the middle man suited him just fine. Unfortunately, rare is the doctor who will agree to work for the sheer privilege of slicing open a sexy, well-traveled journalist. They prefer actual money, or at a stretch, sandwiches. It was under these appalling circumstances that Ford Prefect was compelled, not for the first time, to grit his teeth and get a second job.

For a while he tried working as a barman, having heard it said that one should look to one's greatest passion for a satisfying career, but he soon found that the limits of acceptable pub behaviour are even more annoyingly restrictive for staff than they are for patrons. After that, he managed to blag his way into servicing chicken soup dispensers aboard a subsonic mining ship. This would have been stressful enough for someone whose engineering qualifications _weren't_  hastily cobbled together out of napkins and cut-up copies of _Playbeing_ , so Ford had no chance. Between his lack of expertise and the dispensers' tendency to resist his attentions at all costs, the crew often went without chicken soup on that voyage.

All this was now nothing but a blurry memory to Ford. For almost a decade he had been floundering on an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet called Earth, where nobody else had ever been to Epsilon Eridani b. For zark's sake, the natives got themselves worked up into enough of a lather about landing a couple of jocks on their own rubbish moon for the first time. That year, Ford had been living in New York City with some hippies who didn't really approve of the 'space race,' as the Earthlings laughably termed it. They didn't own a television, so Ford - compelled to witness the event by a combination of wistfulness and the urge to take the piss - invited himself into a crowded student living room, where everyone assumed he was a friend of somebody else.

There was a strong atmosphere of triumph among the gathered youths. Not a few patriotic tears were shed when the quivering image of the US flag was planted on an alien surface. As the human astronauts swayed across the screen, Ford couldn't keep himself from sneering and muttering bitter remarks about the naivety of their self-congratulation. This, it ought to go without saying, didn't win him any friends.

He didn't care. He was only on Earth to study their culture and find out how best a hitchhiker might get around. Just because he was stuck with pretending to be one of them didn't mean he had to like it. Ford told himself this often, and for the most part it stood him in good stead, but now and then something would go alarmingly wrong - as it had with the fear wasps - and he would find himself careening down a new, unexpected pathway through human society.

His present situation was a result of just such a mishap. By now he had moved to London because American paranoia was starting to make him paranoid, and because the muddled understanding of Doctor Who he'd received second-hand seemed to suggest the English might be more open to the idea of coming in peace. The impact of this move on Ford's life was mixed: on the one hand, alcoholism turned out to be a cornerstone of British social life, which fitted him like a glove on an Argabuthon handbot. On the other, his Doctor Who-inspired optimism was apparently unfounded. An argument over his birth certificate ultimately led to the termination of his financial support from the local overlords, who resented paying benefit to immigrants from other parts of their own world, let alone interplanetary interlopers.

If there was any justice in this, Ford could not see it. In London it was expensive to have anything approaching fun, even if your idea of fun extended only as far as drinking a lot and dancing with girls. Payment from the _Guide_  came through erratically these days, and he knew it was only a matter of time before they declared him MIA and stopped sending money altogether. On other worlds, there was always the option of donating to tissue banks or renting out one's body parts to medical science, but here the only doctors who would care to get their hands on him worked for shady government agencies. Boring as it was to live among the humans, Ford didn't much fancy sticking out the rest of his thousand-year lifespan as a test subject in one of their secret laboratories. It was looking increasingly likely that he would once more have to suck it up and find another job.

He was bemoaning a heavily redacted version of this state of affairs in the Hand and Shears, filling himself with as much whiskey as his scraped-together change could buy, when just to shut him up a local came to him with a suggestion. In all Ford's years of claiming to be an out of work actor, nobody had ever introduced him to the concept of an in-work actor, but that was precisely what this local did. _Tell you what, mate,_ he said, _I know a guy who works for the BBC. He could probably get you something in radio. How's that sound?_

To Ford it sounded perfectly ridiculous. Here he was, facing up to his problems by drunkenly complaining about them, and some joker thought it appropriate to offer him practical solutions? Still, he wasn't sure how to refuse without causing offence. He took the contact details of this busybody's friend at BBC radio. He mumbled his thanks, then sloped off home to stare hopelessly out of the skylight.

It was all so unfair, Ford thought, settling back for a good night's hopeless staring. It was one thing for small-minded Earth creatures to spend their whole lives milling about on this boring rock; they didn't know what they were missing. But what about him? He, who had eaten star kraken casserole prepared by the inverted chefs of Mettondura? He, who had been violently ill in orbital taxis up and down the galaxy (often after chancing it on a dodgy Mettonduran casserole)? He was a hitchhiker, a make-doer, always moving on to new and more pleasurable pastures. Ford Prefect wasn't supposed to be the kind of person who took boring tips about boring jobs from boring strags in boring pubs. In the darkness, he toyed with the receipt on which the phone number was written. His eyes scanned the view through the skylight, but it was cloudy and orange with the city's polluting glow.

Just over a minute later, there was a clunk at the other end of the line. A man's voice stumbled out of the receiver. "Wh..? H-hello, who's there?"

"Arthur Dent?" demanded Ford, squinting at the receipt.

"I, er, yes," replied the man in question, "who are you? What's wrong?"

"Nothing," said Ford, "nothing's wrong."

"Then why the blazes are you calling me at... one fifteen a.m.? Who _are_ you?"

Ford was a bit too sloshed to know how this was going. His gut feeling was that it was going well. "My name is Ford Prefect. I'm an actor," he explained. "I was told you could get me a job."

"Oh, Christ." There was a note in Arthur Dent's voice which suggested he should have known it would be something like that. He yawned heavily. "Look, can you... _ah_... can you call back another time? I'm going back to sleep."

"Of course," said Ford, "no problem. Sleep well, Mr Dent. Thank you so much."

"Huh? Right," slurred Dent. "Don't mention it." The line abruptly went dead.

Ford put his flatmate's phone back on the hook, the receipt back in his pocket and staggered back to his loft room with a small but satisfying feeling of accomplishment. Deciding to cut his staring short for tonight, he rolled onto his front and fell into a blissfully silent sleep.

* * *

The next day, after a lie-in that lasted most of the morning, Ford set out to find the office of his new contact. On the receipt, beneath the name and phone number, was written what seemed to be a street name, which narrowed his scope down considerably from all the office blocks in London but not by too much. This was ideal, as Ford needed a bit of time to work out exactly what he was hoping to achieve. A dawdled hour or so spent trying to find the right building would provide ample opportunity for a little cautious self-examination. (Ford knew himself too well to be anything but cautious in his dealings with himself.)

It wasn't that he genuinely hoped this Arthur Dent could find him work, that much was clear. Not that it wouldn't be nice to land a cushy acting job. Ford didn't know the first thing about acting,* but from what he could tell it mostly involved yelling made-up stories while bright lights were shone in your face. Ford already knew he could do that, no problem. But no, he didn't seriously expect to get hired this way, not when it seemed that there were over a million local humans already looking for work in a state of some agitation. Not while the fabled Economic Recovery remained incomplete.

What, then, could he possibly be expecting of Arthur Dent? Someone new to complain at? Something to while away the afternoon besides more staring out of the skylight and playing with his Sens-O-Matic?

After a great deal of ambling up and down outside big brick buildings, peering at signs and labels on doorbells, Ford finally located the building where the BBC apparently saw fit to store its Arthur Dents. As he sidled past the receptionist on the ground floor, Ford got the sense that she was trying to grab ahold of him, metaphorically speaking, but found little about his character that was steady enough to make a good hand-hold. He left her with one of his trademark manic grins and retreated into a lift.

Ford was terribly fond of Earth lifts and had praised at length in his review of the planet (now pushing nine hundred thousand words) the rarity of their attempts to strike up conversations with passengers. Up and down, that was all there was to it. If anything, the fortnight he spent living in one had only strengthened his approval, and left to his own devices he probably would have stayed there longer. It was, after all, the most comfortable accommodation to be found anywhere in the Bronx at the time. This lift belonged to a swankier tradition than that one, and that came with its own joys. There was a part of Ford that enjoyed being surrounded by mirrors: fragmented views of his own body from unfamiliar angles, all hidden behind corners and rotating in strange directions. It appealed to his masochistic side. Since he was alone for the first part of his upward journey in this particular lift, he took the opportunity to practice that grin. Lips, teeth, eyes, good. No, more. Half a dozen Fords beamed back at him. Wider. Harder. Bluer.

He was still practicing when the lift stopped at the second floor and the doors opened to admit a new passenger. This unfortunate young man was hit full in the face with a mirrored box full of Ford Prefect at his most troublingly toothy, fists clenched in concentration, eyes shining with the weird blue light of a being at the end of its tether.

The young human, whose name was Terrence, was shaken by the instant and instinctive knowledge that here was something quite unlike himself. However, despite the protestations of every cell in his body, he couldn't quite bring himself to back away. It would, after all, have been terribly rude. He'd been toying with the idea of taking the stairs right up until the doors opened, but had dithered too long, and now good manners compelled him to take the lift lest he offend this obvious maniac already within. Terrence cursed his indecision and stepped politely into the lift, feeling quite certain that these were to be his last moments.

On this front, of course, Terrence was misguided. He and Ford passed the few seconds' ride up to the third floor in uneventful silence, surrounded by their own jagged and intersecting reflections. Against his instincts, Ford had put away his grin, reasoning that he might need it for whatever obstacles lay between him and Arthur Dent on the next leg of his journey.

He stepped out onto the third floor, ignoring Terrence, who was grateful and unnerved in equal parts. In fact he went on to ride the lift all the way to the top floor, even though he had meant to get out on the third as well. This fact was of no consequence to Ford Prefect, who was now trying to make his way unobserved past another receptionist.

Unfortunately for Ford, this one was more adept at grabbing hold of slippery people than her ground floor counterpart. Ford responded with a sheepish smile to the stare she was giving him over her glasses, then slunk back to stand in front of her desk, looking for all the world like a naughty schoolboy. The blazer and satchel, and the fact that he stood about 5'5" tall, might have had something to do with it.

"Can I help you?" asked the receptionist, looking him up and down. For reasons that have already been covered, it wasn't far to look.

"Er, yeah," said Ford. "I'm here to see Arthur. I've got an appointment."

His receptionist adversary seemed unconvinced. "What's your name, sir?"

Ford told her. She glared at him. When he refused to change his stance on the matter, she looked instead at one of the files on her desk. "What time is your appointment?"

Ford's mind ticked over. "What time is it now?"

"Half past three."

"Half past three," echoed Ford quickly. "That's what I was going to say. My appointment's at half past three. Can I go in to see him now, please?"

As looks of enthusiasm went, hers did not seem likely to make the all-time top hundred. Ford began, very slowly, to smile. He hadn't got far before her eyes darted back to the file, and she puffed a haughty sigh. "Wait a moment, please." The receptionist leaned in to the intercom on her desk and buzzed through. "Mister Dent, there's a Ford Prefect here to see you."

Ford recognised the answering voice from last night's telephone call. It sounded thoroughly alarmed. "A what? Inside the building?"

"He says he has an appointment, but I've no record of it."

"Oh, I see. Er..."

Before Dent could get any further, Ford bent over the desk and shoved his face up against the intercom. The receptionist cried out, but he ignored her. This had gone on long enough, he decided. "Arthur, it's me," he said. "We spoke last night, do you remember?"

"Oh," said Dent, "that was you, was it?"

"Yeah. Now, can I come in?"

Dent paused. "I suppose so. But -"

Before he had a chance to withdraw his agreement, Ford turned off the intercom and straightened up with a satisfied smile. Already striding off towards Dent's office, he called back to the receptionist, "Forgive me for being so forthright! I sometimes let my impatience get the better of me. For what it's worth, I thought you were very professional! Let's do this again sometime!"

 

In the early 20th Century, surging advancement in human technology meant their skylines became dominated by taller and taller tower blocks. In order that reaching the upper levels of these monstrous buildings did not become a three-week affair involving rucksacks of tinned food and the nightly pitching of tents, they were usually fitted with contraptions known in American English as 'elevators,' in British English as 'lifts,' and in the jargon of the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as 'Happy Vertical People Transporters (R).' These contraptions - which Ford Prefect, in the interests of keeping his character count down, referred to as 'lifts' throughout his draft review of Earth - saved everyone a lot of time and hassle and, considering the potential dangers of dropping a big steel box full of people down the side of a building, were surprisingly safe to use.

The main drawback, as is so often the case with these things, came in the form of the people using them. Their increasingly rapid and mechanised society had nurtured their impatience to the point that even waiting a few minutes for their steel box to hit the ground seemed an irredeemably tedious chore. People tapped their feet and rolled their eyes at the crawling pace of their vertical transportation. They checked their analogue wristwatches far more often than necessary. Some of them made formal complaints, and so the engineers who worked on these buildings became aware of a problem that was summarised thus: _the lifts are too slow._

For a while, they worked tirelessly to resolve this issue. How could the lifts be made faster? The human engineers experimented with building them out of lighter materials, making their shape more streamlined, their mechanisms more effective, their weighting systems more powerful. Any paltry seconds they managed to shave off the journey time went unnoticed by the public, who were now even more annoyed by all the delays caused by installations of experimental new lifts. It seemed that Earth technology as it currently stood was simply too primitive. In despair, the engineers prepared to give up.

It was at this point that one particularly optimistic engineer suggested that perhaps they had failed only because they were looking at the problem in the wrong way. He went back to the report that had started it all, in which it became clear that everyone was unhappy with the lift speed as it currently stood, and the conclusion they had originally drawn from this: _the lifts are too slow._ Suddenly he realised that yes, indeed, the problem had been misdiagnosed from the start. He called for his typist, which was how things were done in the early 20th Century, and had her insert two extra words into the summary of the problem: _people think._

All at once, it was as if a weight had been lifted. The engineers relaxed and agreed with one another what they had privately suspected all along, namely that the lifts were fine and members of the public needed to stop being so damn impatient. From here onward the challenge ceased to be one of improving the lifts and became one of keeping their occupants happy. It was accordingly handed over to a team of psychologists, humans who made it their business to understand what made other humans happy. _People_ think _the lifts are too slow,_ they said to themselves. _What can we get people to think about instead?_

Various solutions were tried, from the playing of recorded music to the provision of strange and unexpected smells. One trading corporation in Liverpool briefly hired a troupe of circus performers to entertain people in the lifts, who were fired when they refused to perform in such a way that there was room for people to ride the lifts alongside them. The best answer finally came in the form of humanity's innate vanity. The interior walls of every lift, it was decided, would henceforth be mirrored. This was less expensive than covering them all with prints of fashionable artworks or the pages of that day's newspapers, and it kept the public occupied for as long as necessary. No matter what time the journey took, every passenger found an endless stream of details to admire or (more frequently) despair over in their own reflections. It was a triumph of lateral thinking and corner-cutting.

That is the story more or less as it was told to Ford Prefect by his arresting officer, after a minor falling-out over the tent he'd pitched in a Bronx elevator escalated into a warrant issued against him by the NYPD. Years later Ford would still think of it whenever he needed cheering up (and not just because it reminded him of that night which, involving as it did several armed policemen, had turned out much better than he'd had any right to expect). To his mind, that story summed up humanity in all their shallow, narcissistic, ingenious pragmatism. Yeah, his adopted species would swallow anything if it was shiny enough to see their faces in. But they were also self-aware enough to exploit their own failings and save themselves a zarkload of money and effort.

'Adopted species' was a phrase Ford only used in his internal monologue when he was feeling particularly impressed by the ape creatures. It didn't happen often, and a few barriers still remained between Ford and true integration with their society. First there was the issue of his own refusal to accept, on a really fundamental level, that this was his life now. Sure, consciously he knew that he was stuck, that it could be decades before he got away - more than enough time, by human standards, to settle down and live a full and stable life. The problem was that after spending so long on the road, the principles of a nomadic lifestyle were hard to shake off. He was pushing two hundred Earth years and, until getting stranded, had been hitchhiking almost continuously since leaving school at twenty. In all that time, any temptation he'd ever felt to find a nice girl, stop dancing and bed himself in for the long haul had always been stamped on. Now the habit of staying detached and moving along quickly was too deeply entrenched. It made it hard to form lasting connections with anything Earthly.

Secondly, there were the humans themselves, and how they in turn struggled to relate to Ford's struggle to relate to them. Many of the more astute of them reacted as Terrence did: with unease, either instant or creeping, at the realisation in the back of their minds that there was something vaguely but unavoidably off about him. His general distraction, odd attacks of stargazing and highly unconvincing explosions of mirth all contributed to a general sense, even among those he considered friends, that he wasn't quite wholesome. The weird eyes and funny name didn't help, either.

Ford was aware of all this. He was not aware that he'd just entered the office of his future best friend, though, and wouldn't have been able to do much with that knowledge in any case. Still, he tried to approach the situation with an open mind. He closed the door behind him and eyed the man under discussion. "Dent?" he asked.

"Yes," said Arthur Dent.

"Arthur Dent?" pressed Ford, stepping toward the desk in the middle of the room.

"Yes," repeated Arthur Dent, nervously. "And you're Ford Prefect, I take it?"

"I am," confirmed Ford Prefect. Satisfied that everyone was now quite clear on the identity of everyone else, he took another moment to inspect, unwittingly, his future best friend. Arthur Dent was a tall, dark and reasonably handsome man, though he bucked the stereotype by also carrying an air of unhappiness and anxiety that ran deeper than the natural unhappiness and anxiety associated with strange intruders to one's workplace. He somehow managed to make standing behind a desk look clumsy and apologetic. In fact, like most English people, he would probably have been a more or less adequate human being in all respects if not for his own crippling sense of inadequacy.

Arthur returned Ford's unblinking stare until his eyes began to water in sympathy, at which point he wiped them on his tie and looked away. When he looked back a few seconds later, Ford was sitting at the other side of the desk with his satchel balanced on his knees. Arthur jumped. "Why did you call me last night? Why did you come here today? What do you want?" he asked in quick succession. He had so many questions in his head that just getting them out of the way was a higher priority than getting them answered. "Would you like a cup of tea? Why didn't you make an appointment? What day is today?"

Ford nodded thoughtfully. "Thursday, I think," he said, after a few seconds of this.

"Ah," said Arthur, and finally he sat down. "That would explain a few things." He turned on his intercom. "Mary, when you get a moment, could we have some tea, please?"

By now Ford had already taken a bit of a shine to Arthur. The human was so distracted by Ford's superficial eccentricities that he was, for the moment, oblivious to his fundamental strangeness. Ford folded his hands on top of his satchel. "I'm sorry if I came at an inconvenient time. You seem upset."

"What? No, no, don't apologise," said Arthur, waving a hand. "Nothing ever gets done here in the afternoons. I'm supposed to be catching up on some of the things that didn't get done this morning, but that can wait for Monday."

"Not tomorrow?"

"Oh, nothing gets done on Fridays. Now, er, Mister Prefect..."

"Call me Ford!"

The suggestion didn't put Arthur at ease, as Ford had hoped. Quite the reverse, in fact. He gave an embarrassed little smirk. "Right. Is that, er, and forgive me for asking, but is that your real name? Only..."

Ford shook his head. "It's part of my sponsorship deal. I'm an actor, see."

"Really? I didn't know Ford did that sort of thing."

"Well, they don't pay me very much."

"Why's that?"

"I'm not a very successful actor."

Arthur pulled a face. "I'd gathered that much. I'm still a little confused as to what exactly -"

"A mutual friend gave me your details," interrupted Ford. "He said you would be able to help me find work. As a favour."

"Right. Which friend was this?"

Screw it, thought Ford, and took a wild guess. "Dave," he said.

A look crossed Arthur Dent's face which suggested his relationship with some poor unsuspecting Dave was about to worsen dramatically. "Right," he muttered. "Thank you so _very_ much, Dave..."

Just then their conversation was interrupted by the arrival of Mary, the floral blouse-clad receptionist. She set two mugs of of tea down on the desk between them, making sure to give Ford a suspicious stare before heading back to the door. Ford's skin crawled a little, but he thanked her before the door closed and he was left alone with Arthur once more.

Arthur took a large sip of his tea, which scalded his mouth. He gave a long sigh of psychological relief and physical pain. "Right," he said again, setting down his mug. "Where were we?"

"You were about to put in a good word for me with all of your radio producer friends," said Ford.

Arthur nodded. Then, with a start, he stopped. "No, I don't think I was. Look... Ford... I'd love to help you. Trust me, I know how hard it is for everybody at the moment, even if you can get sponsored to change your name by major car manufacturers. But I'm a commissioner, you see. I decide what shows get made, not who gets hired to be in them."

"Are you sure?"

Arthur's brows were knitted and, understandably, he looked as if he hadn't enjoyed the process at all. "Yes, thanks, I'm quite sure of my own job description."

"Sure you're sure? Even though you can apparently go a whole workday without observing it at all?"

Luckily for Ford, he had the kind of boyish face that meant he could get away with sounding cheeky where anyone else would sound downright rude. This hadn't stopped people punching it when he pushed his luck too far, but Arthur Dent was not a punching sort of man. He was a self-deprecating half-smiling sort of man who, just at the moment, had nothing better to do than deal with timewasters. "Yes," he retorted, "I said I knew it, not that I was committed to it. I'd rather be in production, actually, if I had my way. Just as I'm sure you'd rather be among the stars if you had yours. But look, that's not how the world works."

It took a moment for Ford, whose mouth had dropped open, to pull himself together and realise that Dent's reference to stars had been figurative. "Right," he stammered. "Yes. No, of course." Curse the English language and the endless tinkering of its speakers! They took pleasure in twisting it out of shape and the more obscure they could make their real meaning the more they congratulated themselves for being clever. It wasn't clever, only irritating, and it wasn't a proper language but a silly, self-indulgent game. Ford closed his eyes. He wasn't disappointed, not at all. He'd never believed it was going to come to anything, anyway. He was just tired. Just on the line between coping and not quite coping any more.

These are some of the many things he didn't say: "No, Arthur, you look. As of this week I'm no longer receiving any benefits. And I don't want to be a drain on your society or anything. I just want to have a good time. God knows, if Betelgeuse VII hadn't been destroyed - which it was, senselessly, right - according to the laws of Betelgeuse VII, I haven't even come of age yet. And it's not even that I miss being out there, you know? It's that none of you people get it. None of you. I can't even say, remember how boring Professor Venpurvel's 5D TV show used to be before the regular Eroticon V slot was brought in? Or, wouldn't Zaphod hate it here, even though he'd probably dig some of the weirder music and damn it, I wish I could go on the pull with him one last time? Because even if I could make you believe it, you'd never, ever _get_ it because you've never seen it for yourselves. All any of you care about, all you can comprehend is what happens here in your tiny, shallow little world, and I can't deal with this half-and-half lifestyle any more, right? I just, if I can't have the freedom then I just want some stability and, and, and."

These are the only things he did say: "You want to be a producer, do you? Tell you what, Arthur, mate. The afternoon's as good as done. I'm fucked, you're unhappy. Why don't we nip out for a drink and you can tell me all about it, hmm?"

Arthur's knitted brows rapidly unraveled. "What?"

Ford threw his hands open in a gesture of peace. He sensed the opportunity for things to turn out much better than he'd had any right to expect. "It'll be all right. I'm a terrible listener and I only get worse when I'm pissed."

This seemed to Arthur an acceptable deal. His expression seemed to signal resignation to the oddness of the tail end of the week and the futility of resisting it. "I suppose you're on, then." And he finished his tea, and stood up. And although he called it 'background research,' none of the things Ford Prefect went on to learn that afternoon were ever submitted for publication to  _The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy,_ so it's fair to say that nobody got any work done at all.

* * *

*In case you were wondering, which Ford wasn't, the first thing is actually how to respond to the question "Ooh, have I seen you in anything on telly?" But to dwell on it in any further detail would be a silly and unforgivable digression.


End file.
